Despite a plethora of resources and guides, there’s surprisingly little playstyle analysis of Adom’s classes. Some classes are fairly self-explanatory, but many are not well explained in the manual, or elsewhere. This primer is an attempt to fix this. For newer players, you can expect to get a feel for the strengths and weaknesses of each class (without spending hours dying). For veterans, this should be a reference if you’re looking for something specific, or haven’t tried a certain class much before. Also, this isn’t meant to be read all at once (If you do, I applaud your attention span). You should just skip to the classes you’re interested in. Newer players are advised to read General Strategy first though.

This is NOT a comprehensive guide. If you’re looking for detailed numbers and specifics, I recommend the Improved Adom Guidebook or the Wiki. I will keep this guide mostly spoiler free for newer players. This is a starting point and a reference sheet for comparison purposes.

Classes are grouped into Casters, Martials, Hybrid/Flexible, and Scummers. But these categories are at least somewhat arbitrary. A character can stretch outside their category via race selection, star signs, or even lucky artifacts. A Wizard may be a caster, but a Troll Wizard born under the Sword is more of a Hybrid than a pure caster. I’ll talk a bit about races and star signs at the end, but that’s not the primary focus. For newer players, keep in mind that even purist classes will still dabble in other methods sometimes. Wizards will still melee weak enemies to save resources and train defenses. Slaying ammunition is amazing for any class. Utility spells such as Light or Darkness can be used by *almost* any class, regardless of their lack of magical ability.

While class variety is pretty wide, there are some relatively universal tactics which should be understood before going into specifics. Almost every class will use melee, archery, and spells at some point. Classes with poor casting may substitute wands, while pure melee will only use missiles for specific enemies that are lethal in melee.

Melee is what every class uses the most, and for good reason. Spells, Ammunition, and Wands are all limited resources. Melee costs nothing. As such, trivial enemies should pretty much ALWAYS be dispatched in melee, regardless of class. The obvious downside of melee is that you’re at substantially more risk. Most of the really nasty effects such as paralysis and stat drain are melee range, not to mention the hardest hitting enemies are melee. Most classes use melee as default for average enemies.

Missile weapons are extremely powerful, and should be used appropriately. You can lean into ranged pretty hard if you desire, as normal arrows or bolts are relatively plentiful by midgame. But the real power of missiles is arrows/bolts of slaying. It could be specific to a creature such as undead, or it could be universal slaying ammo. Missile weapons crit for 2 to 5 times as much damage, and Slaying ammo is a guaranteed crit. Slaying ammo actually increases to 3 to 6 times as much damage if it’s the ammo designed for a specific enemy type (demons, dragons, etc). All of this is before factoring in damage reductions, so against heavily armored foes it results in an even larger increase. Hoard slaying ammo, and always have it in mind when you face the strongest enemies. But don’t waste it!

Magic is extremely flexible, and especially useful against densely packed enemies. Magic attacks mostly penetrate and hit all enemies in a line, not to mention AoE Ball spells. Similar to missile weapons, spells are a limited resource. Whenever you attempt to learn a spell, you gain a certain number of castings. If you run out of castings, you forget the spell entirely. The formula for learning spells is extremely complicated, but in general you need to know a few things. Every class has a different bonus to learning spells. Your success chance increases with your level, as well as from skills like Concentration, and the Learning attribute. The degree of success determines how many castings you gain, which means some classes or builds will have a LOT more spells than others. Also, each spell has a different difficulty to learn, so while every class could learn the Light spell, very few can learn Wish.

Whenever you use a weapon, missile, or shield, you gain skill in that weapon category. Every so many Marks, your skill level increases. Making sure you practice the skills appropriate to your gear matters a lot. If you switch weapons, note that you will have to catch up to where you were before. This isn’t a huge deal, but something to keep in mind. This also means that if you get crappy ammunition, you should still use it on weak enemies to train your missile skills. Shield skills only gain bonuses when successfully blocking, and are *incredibly* powerful once trained up. Generally One Handed and Shield is the safest strategy because of this, but you can try other tactics if your class and build allows.

There’s also a Tactics system which everyone should understand. Basically you can gain accuracy and damage bonuses at the cost of being easier to hit, or vice versa. If you go full Berserk without wearing armor, you gain massive bonuses to hit, which can be useful if you start with crappy armor. When fighting in full Coward, you get an energy cost reduction for movement at low HP. It’s worth noting that some stances limit weapon skill training. You can’t gain Shield marks in Berserk, and you can’t gain melee weapon marks in Very Defensive or Cowardly. Finally, when fighting at range with missiles, you should go into Berserk stance because it affects your ranged attacks. You don’t need those defensive bonuses if you’re not getting hit.

Alright, so that’s the general strategy outline. Now we can get into classes and how they affect the universal game plan. One last thing: It’s rare for you to reach max level. The value of class features is heavily weighted towards the lower levels. For many classes I won’t mention high level features because they don’t really matter.

If you want to cast spells early and often, look no further. For most classes, learning spells is not a guarantee. For the casters, it might as well be. They get a huge bonus at level 1 instead of the slow level bonuses from other classes. They also get TEN TIMES as many spellbooks as other classes, through random drops. The downside of casters is they take twice as many marks to increase weapon skills, and have very low HP growth.

Magic in its purest form. Wizards take the caster archetype to its extreme. They start with TWO spellbooks, one of which is guaranteed to be an offensive spell. They have Literacy maxed at the start of the game, no training required. On the downside, they start with basically no weapon or armor, usually just a robe and a staff or dagger. This poor gear is compounded by some of the lowest HP growth and hit chance of all classes. Despite these weaknesses, Wizards are one of strongest classes in the game. They require careful play and good game sense due to their frailty, but will rapidly have magical answers to every problem, with near limitless castings of any spell they learn.

Their playstyle is pretty straightforward. Spam spells at everything that threatens you. Learn differences between spells, and how to use them to maximize every situation. Any threatening enemy should be killed before they can get close. Enemies which are not threats should be meleed (or shot) to train your weapon skills and save on castings and PP, but by midgame you shouldn’t have any issues with running out of castings. On the note of weapons skills, wizards should definitely use a Shield. Their choice of weapon is up to playstyle.

Early on, you need to be mindful of overusing your starting spell, until you get more spellbooks. Mix in weapons to conserve resources. By midgame, you’ll have multiple offensive options you can cycle between whenever one gets low. You still want to melee for defensive training purposes, but running out of castings is no longer an issue. By endgame, you’ll probably have every spell in the game. If you take a detour to the library, you can guarantee that you’ll have every spell in the game. With such a wide range of spells and so many castings, you should be able to trivialize much of the game with teleports, unresistable ball spells, and tons of utility options.

Class features are excellent, but don’t require much strategic consideration. They just make your spells increasingly cheaper and more spammable as you gain levels. Their skill selection is narrow but good. Because they have Healing and Herbalism, they can take any starting quests they want, and have flexible routing. Alchemy is a great skill later on, potentially allowing them to increase their stats (though the recipe may render this impractical). There’s not a lot of utility skills, but the core is very solid.

Necromancers play VERY similar to Wizards. Same frailty, same magical aptitude, and same ability to learn every spell in the game guaranteed. Where they diverge is that Necromancers don’t get the spell cost reductions that Wizards have. Instead, they get access to a mix of undead themed abilities to supplement their traditional casting playstyle.

The main draw is, of course, necromancy. Necromancy can be used on corpses to create undead slaves which fight for you. This is a very useful ability, but has some extreme drawbacks which prevent it from becoming a playstyle in its own right. For starters, undead are slow, which means you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for them to catch up. They heal slowly, meaning they wear down over time. You can give bones to skeletons to heal them but that is a limited resource. You can’t take followers of any sort to the final levels without glitches, but you can create new followers once you get there. But the biggest deal breaker is that followers in ADOM are notoriously fickle. Accidentally damaging them, even from stepping on an explosive trap, can cause them to turn hostile. If they become stronger than you, this can potentially end your run before you can react.

Despite all these issues, necromancy is still quite useful. Ghuls can paralyze enemies and are available very early. Undead you create inherit some properties from the original creature. If you use a giant corpse, they can be significantly more durable. If you use a quickling, they become faster than you, and can easily keep pace. How much you use necromancy is up to you. It’s ultimately a side gimmick to the main class features, but it can still be fun and useful.

In terms of class skills, Necromancers are quite similar to Wizards, with a few exceptions. They do not get access to Healing, meaning you may want to save the carpenter to gain that skill. On the flipside, Necromancers gain Food Preservation, which actually increases the chance of enemies to drop corpses. This means that valuable corpses which grant intrinsics or attributes will be more common. They also gain the incredibly powerful Find Weakness skill, which can increase crit chance of melee OR ranged attacks. Finally Necromancers gain resistance to the special attacks of undead, which is situationally great. Most notably, it can help short-lived races against aging attacks of ghosts.

So while Necromancers still play like wizards 95% of the time, they do have a bit more aptitude with weapons. The gaining of weapon skills is just as slow, but they can potentially mix in ranged weapons or melee as desired. That said, do not make the mistake of thinking they can be durable melee combatants. Their weapon damage can be decent for a caster, but they’re still frail. Their level 25 “shadow touch” ability is an odd case. With proper unarmed training, it can become quite powerful later on. But it’s still a melee skill on a primary caster with low HP. Unlike Monk or Beastfighter, Necromancer’s unarmed won’t scale up as much, so your damage will be very low in addition to the lack of blessed weapon bonuses.

Despite these downsides, Necromancers CAN wear a shield while using Shadow Touch, which gives them a sizable defense bonus over Beasfighters and Monks. If you use it as your primary attack, you can eventually outheal incoming damage against the vast majority of enemies. But it will also rapidly lower your alignment when used on neutral or lawful enemies. If you go this route, you’ll still want a proper melee weapon for high PV enemies and undead. Constantly equipping and unequipping based on enemy alignment is a huge headache, so you’ll probably just have to live with low alignment.

In summary, Necromancers are wizards with a slightly weaker early game, but who have a lot of undead toys you can play with to add variety. Their spells won’t be as cheap, but they can supplement with weapons that have increased crit chance, including ranged.

Priests are the “divine” wizards of the caster lineup. As far as casters go, they can be surprisingly durable. Their base HP gains are still extremely low, but they start with MUCH better armor than other casters. The manual refers to them as “semi-casters”, meaning they only take 50% more marks to increase weapon skills, instead of double. They also start with a healing spell instead of an attacking spell. All of this tends to lean towards a caster who likes to mix it up in melee a bit. Instead of having lots of HP, they have better defenses and the ability to heal. As with the other casters, when facing really dangerous foes they want to hang back and blast (once they find some damage spells). But early on they can rely on their armor and healing to keep them alive. The road of the caster tends to always lead to heavy focus on spells by mid to late game, but how Priests get there tends to be a lot more physical.

Interestingly, Priests get even better spell discounts than Wizards (as long as they have good standing with their God). They gain significantly more piety from sacrifices, and eventually get massive discounts on prayers. But unlike Wizards and Necromancers, they are not guaranteed access to every spell in the game. As a divine/clerical caster, Priests spellbook drops are skewed towards healing spells and defensive spells, which will likely limit their blasting potential in the earlygame.

As far as skills, Priests have both Healing and Herbalism, giving them an excellent early game. While they lack some of the more useful late game skills, they gain Detect Item Status. This is incredibly useful for newer players, or players who like to equip-identity. Knowing if an item is blessed or cursed before putting it on can prevent a lot of headaches, and help you get geared up more quickly without needing to use scrolls and holy water. Later on, this skill becomes a lot less useful once you have a lot of scrolls of identify.

Priests are a very safe and comfortable caster. Their early game is a bit more leisurely than the rest of the casters, but they’re still just as powerful as the rest by midgame. Their starting equipment and better weapon skills lead to a somewhat more forgiving game than the other casters. Just remember their HP is still on the low end.

Another “semi-caster”, Druids gain weapon skills at the same reduced penalty of Priests, but with less impressive starting gear. Where Druids get interesting is that they have the highest health gains of all the casting classes. It’s still below average, but every little bit helps. They also have surprisingly good melee accuracy, and start with an attacking spell rather than a healing spell like Priests. But the biggest thing that defines Druids is that ALL animals start out neutral, with the exception of hostile summons, tension rooms, and vaults.

Peaceful animals are a pretty big deal, but not always a good thing. In terms of tactics, you can pretty much always run away and swap places with a neutral animal in corridors. Not very friendly to animals, but they make a good meat shield when fleeing. You also don’t have to worry about getting swarmed by annoying animals who multiply. However, this is a double edged sword. You also can’t attack those breeders without suffering an alignment drop. You can get around this using bolt spells or not targeting them directly with missiles, but it’s still an annoyance. The biggest pain is that you can’t sacrifice animals to your god either, unless you’re willing to go fully chaotic.

So Druids have a lot of enemies that don’t bother you directly and can shield you, but ALSO can’t use those enemies to extract resources or gain piety. It’s quite the tradeoff. Ironically, they’re a divine caster who kind of sucks at gaining piety, at least early on. On the other hand, they’re the only divine caster who starts with a blasting spell. Divine spell tome drops skew towards heals and defensive spells, but Druids can blast from level 1. The one big upside is that druids have a very easy time avoiding killing any Cats. This means they are very nearly guaranteed access to the best ring in the game, eventually.

As far as skills, Druids get Healing, Herbalism, Gardening, and Swimming. These are a solid base, but don’t have any extra utility. So another caster with open options in the early game. That said, the Druid quest gives them much better rewards than normal. Druids still do the normal caster routine of meleeing weak enemies, and blasting dangerous enemies while gaining a huge plethora of spells by mid to late game. But unlike all the other casters, Druids class abilities are awful! Seriously, you might as well just ignore them because they don’t affect your gameplay at all. This is a definite downside, but it does open some interesting doors. Because Druids don’t care about levels at all, they can opt for a slow leveling race like Troll without losing any real benefits. You can build a Druid to be surprisingly durable.

All in all, Druids are still casters, which means they’re a top tier class. But they lack a lot of the fancy tricks and toys of the others. In exchange, they get a little more durability, melee accuracy, and the ability to hide behind woodland creatures in a pinch. Early game, they play a lot more like a normal caster than a Priest. Late game, they’re not quite as powerful of a caster as a Priest. But the baseline casting bonuses still more than carry them.

The red headed step-child of casters, Elementalists break a lot of the rules. They learn spells by leveling up, rather than needing to find books. In fact, they start the game with two offensive spells right at level one. The downside is that they don’t have the increased spellbook drop rate of other casters. They get the baseline drop rate of spellbooks, meaning they find FAR fewer spells than the rest of the casters. They can still learn what spells they do find perfectly well, but they won’t find many. This makes a much narrower playstyle than the other casters. They can blast just as well as the rest, but will lack utility options or flexibility.

Something to note is that exp gains tend to slow down substantially in midgame. This makes Elementalists the one caster class that can be at risk of running out of spells. If you play smart and don’t waste castings, you likely won’t run into this issue. But for a newer player, you should be especially mindful of not wasting your spells. Elementalists are almost as squishy as wizards, and have no bonuses to melee or ranged either.

As far as skills go, Elementalists get Healing, but no Herbalism. Class powers are generally just okay. Elementalists get some good resistances through leveling up, as well as water breathing and eventually being able to summon elementals. Their “elemental storm” power is a trap, as it doesn’t bypass magic resistances like Ball spells, and costs a fortune.

As far as casters go, Elementalist are very front-loaded, and tend to have a very easy game due to having so much blasting power from the very start. Their assortment of blasting spells is more than enough to win the game with smart play, and makes them very powerful. They get some free resistances too. Just don’t get lazy and throw out spells when not needed, or you’ll find yourself spell starved when you need it most.

The “Hit things really hard” classes of ADOM. Their preferred tactics are varied, but they all focus on using weapons to mess enemies up. Their casting abilities are subpar, so they usually won’t be able to get too many castings. And they definitely won’t be learning high powered spells at all. Most (but not all) of the Martial classes gain really good HP as part of the tradeoff.

Fighters are to Martials what Wizards are to Casters. They fight, and they do it well. They are definitely more defense focused than other martials, but don’t mistake that as a lack of damage. They have good starting equipment, and boast some of the highest HP and attack bonus gains of any class. Some may consider them boring, but you can’t knock their martial versatility.

As far as skills are concerned, Fighters have pretty much every combat skill, and advance them quickly. Athletics gives a speed boost and increased stats. Archery boosts their ranged abilities, and allows them to pick up archery-specific talents. Dodge gives a marginal bonus to DV. Find Weakness is an absurdly powerful skill for melee or ranged. They even get Two Weapon Combat if you want to go down that road, although two weapon fighting is generally much weaker than other options.

What they don’t have, is Healing or Herbalism. This means that unless you’re born under the Candle, you’ll probably want to pick up the Healing skill, which means you won’t have the Herbalism skill. Factoring this in, Fighters still need to play things a little on the slow side early and grab needed skills through quests.

Their class features aren’t flashy, but they are still pretty good. Fighters get additional DV from the Dodge skill. It’s not a massive increase, but still helpful. They gain PV bonuses based on their equipment, which makes them even more durable. And then they get a 10% increased crit chance. It’s worth noting that while these bonuses favor melee, the crit bonus makes them superior archers as well.

All these small bonuses add up to a very stable and safe martial class. Use melee to kill most things. Train up your missile skills for enemies you can’t melee. Slowly become a versatile juggernaut. Stable and strong.

Barbarians lack the versatility of the Fighter, but gain much greater speed and power. They begin with amazingly good Strength and Toughness, and decent equipment. The big downside of Barbarians is that they start the game illiterate (excluding certain races). This means they can’t use scrolls until they learn to read sometime into the midgame. That means no scrolls of identify. Even once they do acquire literacy, Barbarians are the second worst casters in the game. Trying to learn even the simplest of spells will be a struggle.

Their skills are good for combat, but not overly versatile. Athletics and Dodge boost their combat abilities nicely. They have Two Weapon Combat if they wish to pursue that playstyle. Unfortunately, they lack the increased crit chance of Find Weakness. This hurts their damage output, but they make up for it in other ways. Oddly Barbarians have Herbalism, but not Healing. Given their high HP, they definitely will want to pick up the Healing skill as their first order of business.

Class features are what really make Barbarian interesting. They rapidly gain the ability to perform “power attacks” with their Mighty Blows ability. These attacks do double damage, but take 2.5x as long. This eventually grows to 3x damage but takes 4x as long. This seems like a bad trade until you factor in PV. Against heavily armored foes, Barbarians can essentially “crit” on demand. Unfortunately, most of the tankiest enemies hit extremely hard. Used incorrectly, this power can get you killed, especially since you can miss even when trying to use it to finish off low HP enemies. However, there is a bug where if you miss a power attack, you retain the damage bonus (without the time increase) until you land another attack. You can even cheese it by intentionally missing weak enemies. With such a high risk to reward ratio, how much you use it depends on if you can tank a miss, how comfortable you are with risk, and if you like cheese.

Barbarians also gain a large movement speed increase. This is useful for getting into melee, but also useful for escaping or kiting. While Barbarians favor melee, this class feature means they can kite with missiles as well. It can’t be understated how powerful such a speed boost is for archery. Despite lacking any missile bonuses, Barbarians are well positioned to fight at range. Given their inability to cast spells, this is critical against the enemies that are too dangerous to melee. Later, Barbarians get even more hit points through class features as well.

Taken as a whole, Barbarians stick to a simple game plan. Lean into their offenses. Use their speed to strike from the best position, or kite enemies they can’t overpower. Their consistent damage output is not as high as some other classes, but they can unload for massive damage on demand. They don’t have any defensive powers, but have extremely high HP gains to allow them to tank more hits. While this seems to lean into a two-handed strategy, Barbarians are still able to choose two weapon fighting or one handed and shield. You could use their power attacks to compensate for lower damage of a shield setup, for example. They’re not as versatile as other martials, but they’re still fully capable with all weapons. And while they lack any archery bonuses, having such a huge speed bonus is enough to make archery a key part of their kit. This works out nicely, because most of the really dangerous enemies are too unsafe to use Mighty Blows on. Everything else they can comfortably destroy in melee.

Assassins are the first of the “skillful” martial classes. While still extremely combat capable, their real strength comes from an amazingly wide skill set. They aren’t as durable as other martials, but still have excellent melee and ranged accuracy. Over time they become damage powerhouses. Their starting equipment is no slouch either. They begin the game with decently good gear, a handful of daggers, and four levels in thrown daggers AND regular dagger skill. On top of this, they begin with a couple potions of poison they can dip their weapons in. While they don’t have a “proper” ranged weapon with lots of ammo, thrown daggers very rarely break. They only get a couple throws before they have to pick up their daggers and reload, but for earlygame this will handle any melee threats.

Assassins have an amazingly wide range of useful skills. Alchemy gets them access to a lot of great potions, as well as stat increases in lategame. While I didn’t mention it for the caster classes, this also opens up the option of “battle alchemy” as well. If they can acquire fire immunity or heavy resistance, they can intentionally make an incorrect recipe to cause an explosion. Early on this is too dangerous, but later this allows a sort of semi-caster option. Alertness is one of the best defensive skills in the game, providing excellent chances to dodge spells alongside a marginal DV bonus. Archery opens the door to some missile talents if you want to go that path. Backstabbing nearly doubles damage against unaware enemies. This can be triggered passively via Stealth or Invisibility, but can also be applied more “directly” via the Darkness or Blindness (Brief aside: There’s a lot of ways to cause both effects, but thrown potions of blindness or cursed potions of invisibility will blind any monster hit. Darkness can be caused by spell, scroll, or gem). Detect Traps is an incredibly powerful skill that can prevent equipment destruction or headaches in certain areas that are full of traps. Dodge provides a great DV bonus which stacks with Alertness for even more defense.

As if that wasn’t enough, Assassins gain the incredibly potent Find Weakness skill for massively boosted crit chance. Two Weapon Fighting allows them to dual wield if they so desire. And finally on the slightly less impressive end, Pick Locks can be helpful to avoid breaking doors before you acquire keys. Suffice it to say, Assassins are INSANELY versatile with skills. But there is one rather large gap in their skill set. They lack both Healing and Herbalism skills. So they can only pick one. Given their Alchemy bonuses, they might opt for Herbalism and just accept the dangers of weak healing (or compensate with Candle). But it is generally safer to just grab the Healing skill and accept lower herb yields and rely on scrolls of uncursing to make them usable.

Assassins boast some amazingly strong class skills as well. They receive a massive hidden boost to crit chance in melee, which scales with level and stacks with Find Weakness. They receive half this crit bonus to missile weapons, but with Find Weakness they’re critting monsters at melee or range. They can create poisons from any potion besides water or carry juice. Given the number of mediocre potions, they can have poison on demand all game, at least for key targets. Generally poison falls off somewhat after earlygame, but it’s a nice feature if you want to use it. Backstabbing damage gets doubled early on, which is really good IF they can leverage it. Access to backstabs is somewhat luck dependent, but invisibility can make this more accessible. Their missile range bonus is unfortunately useless. Your base range is more than enough after a few ranks in missile weapons. This might be useful in the wilderness, but that’s an insignificant portion of the game with very little danger. At level 25 they get a huge crit increase which stacks with Find Weakness. And in the late game they get double DV bonus from Dodge.

All of this comes together to a class that does monstrous damage at melee or range, on top of excellent DV bonuses from skills and class features. The wide range of skills gives them a lot of tools to increase their power or mitigate annoyances such as traps. And these damage bonuses are available at level 1 through dagger skills and starting with poisons. However, they are fairly squishy as far as martial classes go, and need to play more carefully as a result. This tends to discourage more risky setups such as two weapon fighting, despite their skill in it. Fortunately, with all their crit boosts (and Archery skill), Assassins put out staggering amounts of damage at melee or range.

The second of the “skillful” Martial classes, Rangers lose out on the massive damage advantages of the Assassin in exchange for moderately increased durability and some two weapon fighting bonuses. In practice this isn’t a worthwhile trade, and puts Rangers among the weaker classes. Shields are pretty much always better than dual wielding, even for the class that specializes in it. Regardless of the lower damage, Rangers start with both Healing and Herbalism, giving them much better sustain in the earlygame, as well as complete freedom to choose their route. They’re not restricted to an optimal path like many other classes, and can freely go where they wish.

Defensively, Rangers have a lot of overlap with Assassins. They gain Alertness and Dodge to boost their DV massively and protect against spells. Unlike Assassins, they gain Athletics for increased speed and stats. Healing makes their earlygame more forgiving of mistakes because you can quickly recover. Herbalism gives them a lot of potential to boost stats by midgame, compounding these defensive bonuses. And they still have Archery for a ranged focused playstyle if they so desire. Perhaps most interesting is that Rangers gain Food Preservation. This can massively increase the drop rate of corpses, allowing them to gain intrinsics, resistances, or stat increases from slain enemies. It’s a very useful skill. As mentioned earlier, Rangers get a lot of benefits from dual wielding, so they start with Two Weapon fighting.

As far as class skills, Rangers have a hidden feature that causes them to receive no penalties when dual wielding, as long as the weapons are not over the weight limit (combined weight of 60s or less). Unfortunately, that’s probably their best class feature until lategame. They get a bunch of wilderness skills which don’t matter, a missile range increase which doesn’t matter, and eventually an increased weight limit on dual wielding, which probably doesn’t matter. It *might* be useful, but it comes way too late, and if you dual wield in the ultra lategame you’ll want to pursue Needle and Sting anyways, which weigh almost nothing. Their best leveled feature is a movement speed bonus, but this doesn’t kick in until level 40. If you even reach that level, it’s an amazing feature. But you probably won’t get it in a typical game.

Rangers are probably the most balanced of the skillful classes. They don’t have quite as much damage output as classes like Assassin, but tend to be more durable. They don’t have quite as wide a skillset as Thieves or Assassins, but have amazing growth potential. The combination of Food Preservation and Herbalism lets them boost their stats as they play, without being so frail they rely on it to be viable. Two Weapon Fighting is generally not the optimal playstyle, but rangers can certainly go down that road. Just be mindful that they’re not as tanky as classes such as Fighters or Barbarians.

The last of the “skillful” martial classes, thieves are pretty frail for a martial class. They can get okay starting equipment. They have terrible HP, similar to Assassin, but worse combat skills. Thieves need to play slowly early on, until they develop their skills and get some momentum. That said, they have unusually good ability to learn spells, comparable to most hybrid characters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thieves have a decent skill set. It’s lacking in a lot of core skills like Herbalism and Healing, but has a ton of utility. This pretty much locks them into acquiring the Healing skill, but given their weak start they want to take their time anyway. Alertness is a great defensive skill as always. Backstabbing is their only offensive skill, which is useful if inconsistent. Detecting Traps and Disarm Traps saves a lot of time and gold training with the Thieves Guild. Pick Locks has some utility. Pick Pockets is a useful scumming tool, but very tedious. Interestingly, they lack Concentration despite decently strong casting ability. This is a downside for spamming spells, but means if they acquire Concentration their casting ability can surpass most hybrids.

Class features are a mixed bag. Half of their features are misleading or don’t work, but the other half are quite good. They automatically search on every step, which makes them extremely unlikely to stumble into traps. They receive double damage from Backstabbing. Thieves should definitely lean into this whenever possible. Backstabs can be triggered passively from stealth or invisibility, but can also be triggered when attacking in Darkness (against most enemies). You can also blind enemies with thrown potions of blindness, cursed potions of invisibility, and missile weapons of darkness. They gain the ability to rob shops by midgame. While this sounds great, it’s actually a trap feature. Every class can rob shops if they gain a source of invisibility. Potions of invisibility are quite common. Furthermore, if you’re caught stealing with this class feature, it angers the shopkeeper and prevents further shopping (as well as probably getting you killed). Failing to steal via invisibility doesn’t cause anger. Don’t even bother with this.

Stunning on crits is amazing, especially if you can increase your crit chances. However, it makes melee kiting slow enemies MUCH riskier. It’s generally an advantage, but not always. At level 32 they get increased power to pickpocketing. This sounds amazing, but testing by the community has shown this doesn’t actually do anything. If you have the patience for tedious gameplay, pickpocketing can already get you some good stuff over a long enough time frame, but it’s very much an acquired taste. All said, the trap and backstab features are quite good, but the theft features are a disappointment.

Thieves are definitely one of the weakest classes in the game, and pickpocketing is not for everyone. They have mediocre combat abilities, but surprisingly good casting potential if you acquire Concentration. If they can utilize their Backstabbing advantages, they can play like a much weaker Assassin. In truth, Thief feels more like a challenge class than a proper class, but if you really hate traps then you might find yourself enjoying them.

Archers are, obviously, masters of ranged damage and missile weapons. They’re probably the squishiest martial class in the game, and don’t have any melee advantages either. In many ways, they play more like a spellcaster as a result. But they’re even weaker at spellcasting than other martials as well. All of this is worth it for the sheer missile power that Archers have. In a game where casting classes dominate the top tiers, Archers are arguably the strongest class in the game. Missile weapons are insanely powerful, and Archers make that even stronger. Who needs versatility when you can destroy anything you see?

Skill-wise, Archers lack Healing or Herbalism, narrowing their early game options substantially. They have both Dodge and Alertness which gives them good DV bonuses and spell evasion, but this mostly serves to offset their frailty, not make them actually durable. Oddly, they have Concentration, which boosts mana regen and spell learning ability, but this isn’t really enough to offset their poor spellcasting ability. Still, if you max it out they can maybe pick up some weak utility spells. But the real draw is that they gain Archery and Fletchery. Archers passively receive double the bonuses to hit and damage from the archery skill, putting them ahead of other classes. Fletchery gives them even more ammunition so they can be far more liberal with ranged attacks. Archers don’t have the Find Weakness skill unfortunately, but even without that their damage is excellent.

Archer class features all lean into missile weapons. They’re not a versatile class, but that doesn’t matter. They receive a hidden bonus to crit chance with missile weapons, which scales with level. Lategame this can effectively replace Find Weakness, but if it also stacks with Find Weakness if you acquire it through other means. As mentioned, they receive double the bonuses from the Archery skill. They also have increased chances to find ammunition and fletchery sets, helping them to never run out of ammo. As they level, Archers receive a 20% and eventually a 40% energy cost reduction to ranged attacks, allowing them to unload missiles downrange even faster. They get a range bonus to missiles, but this is practically useless to the high base range. They receive some kind of bonus to fletching, but this is not well understood. At very high levels, their missiles can penetrate armor sometimes, and even hit multiple enemies, but this is usually too high level to become a factor. The real winner is ultimately the massive increase in ranged attack speed. Everything else is secondary. And that speed boost kicks in as early as level 6!

So Archers are not a versatile class. They have probably one of the simplest playstyles in the game. But when you strip away all those things they miss out on, you’re left with an absolute monster of ranged damage. Like a modern artillery weapon, Archers absolutely destroy anything they can shoot at. Just try not to let enemies get close or get surrounded. You probably want to train up your shield skill on trivial enemies still, much like a Wizard. But your bread and butter is going to be missile weapons. And Archers get a LOT of ammunition and missile bonuses.

Occupying a range somewhere between Monk and Barbarian, Beastfighters are THE unarmed fighting class. This isn’t just because they’re good at unarmed strikes. Rather, they get such massive penalties to using melee weapons that they can’t do anything besides unarmed. This has some unusual side effects which are not readily apparent. For one thing, blessed weapons do +50% damage to demons and undead. Beastfighters are completely unable to gain this bonus, putting them on the back foot against those enemies. This is even worse against certain undead like Liches, which can heal themselves.

Because Beastfighters unarmed attacks scale with level, this gives them a huge power spike in the earlygame. At level 1 their damage is pretty weak (although their starting Strength compensates for it), but you usually gain 6-10 levels quite rapidly, resulting in an incredibly smooth earlygame. They probably have the easiest early game of any class. They don’t need to equip-identify weapons. They’re almost as tanky as Barbarians. They even start with both Healing and Herbalism leaving them completely free to do as they wish at the start. Any opening route works for them, within reason. There are some high risk high reward openings only available to casters, but any “normal” opening will be fairly trivial. However, they suffer a rather massive downside in that they start illiterate.This isn’t as big of a problem as with Barbarians because they can ignore weapons entirely, but it’s still a big issue until they can gain literacy in the midgame. Equip-identifying a cursed item is still bad, but at least you won’t be locked into a crappy weapon.

Skills are narrow, but solid. On top of Healing and Herbalism, Beastfighters gain Athletics to increase speed and stats. Dodge grants them extra DV to somewhat compensate for their lack of shields. And Swimming helps them deal with water. Unfortunately, that’s all they get. They lack the Find Weakness skill, Alertness, or any utility skills whatsoever. This lack of Find Weakness naturally segues into one of the class’s biggest issues.

Experience gains tend to massively slow down in the midgame. While Beastfighters get a huge power spike early on due to rapidly gaining levels, their damage starts to fall behind once other classes get their hands on artifact weapons, or weapons with good prefixes or suffixes. Beastfighters are an extremely frontloaded class. They may be tearing enemies apart early, but in midgame they’re relying more on their speed and durability to keep going. The one “upside” is that because they can only use one weapon skill (unarmed), they likely will be a few levels ahead of other classes. But this is not nearly enough.

Beastfighters compensate for their low damage through class features. In addition to their unarmed damage bonuses, they passively gain increased DV and speed through leveling up. By level 20 for example, they have +6 DV and +10 speed. This isn’t a massive increase, but every little bit helps. Their listed class features are pretty meh at low levels. Poison resistance is important, but can be acquired by eating nearly any corpse of a venomous creature. Stun resistance rarely comes up. Their level 18 feature on the other hand is excellent. They get a movement speed bonus even better than Barbarians (though not as good as Monks). Combined with their speed bonus, Beastfighters can compensate for their middling melee with missile weapons. They receive no missile bonuses, and their missile accuracy is not great, but double dipping on speed and movement bonuses makes them amazing at kiting when needed. At very high levels they can swap positions with hostile monsters, but this comes very late.

Beastfighters are a weird class. They’re probably the least RNG dependent class in the game. They have a healthy baseline damage that will never be weak, but never becomes great either. They may want to choose Dark Elf or Orc as their race just for the huge boon that is Find Weakness. Their earlygame is trivially easy due to their rapid damage boost, durability, and not needing to find a weapon. But by midgame they rely on speed and kiting to deal with really dangerous foes. Eventually, if you can get to really high levels, that unarmed damage will catch up to the good weapons again. It will never surpass them due to some really amazing artifact weapons and bless bonuses. Any chance you find to gain experience should be taken. This also creates a funny incentive where any vaults that can be cleared safely (NOT greater undead vaults) should probably be cleared for experience even if the artifacts are all useless weapons. Despite this narrow focus, their reduced reliance on equipment and increased speed and durability makes them feel very forgiving, even if they’re not particularly powerful. Beastfighters are the “endurance hunter” class, wearing down enemies with consistent damage and stability, not flashy skills or high damage.

Essentially a Fencer, or a precision based melee class, Duelists specialize in one handed weapons. They receive absolutely massive bonuses to melee, but lose them if they dual wield, use a shield, or a two handed weapon. They also lose their bonuses if they wear armor weighing more than 250s, or become Burdened. Duelists have to travel light to use their abilities, and should avoid these restrictions after the earlygame (using a shield or good armor early is probably worth it before you train up your weapon skills). They are so extremely focused on one handed weapons that they take 10 times as many marks to train up missile skills, and well over double to train up shields or two handed weapons. Even one handed polearms suffer from this penalty. But in exchange for this, one handed weapons increase 20% faster, helping them reach high levels very quickly. That said, Duelists are still somewhat squishy for a melee class. They’re still better than Rangers or Paladins, but fall somewhat behind Beastfighters, and way behind Barbarians or Fighters.

Their skills are equally focused. They gain Alertness and Dodge to increase their evasion, Athletics to increase their stats, and the incredibly powerful Find Weakness to boost their crit chance. They start with Healing as well to give them a little earlygame boost (and encourage them to grab Herbalism). Despite having the concentration skill, they’re still very mediocre casters. You might be able to barely learn some bolt spells to book cast, but I’d recommend dropping anything vulnerable to flames and training across the room just to be safe.

For all of these costs, Duelists get some insanely strong bonuses through class features. At level 1, they get a small attack and damage bonus per weapon skill level. They also have a small chance to penetrate (ignore PV) on humanoid enemies when striking. They gain +60% energy cost reduction per weapon skill level, allowing them to attack extremely fast at high levels. They get an identical DV bonus to shield skill, based on the weapon they’re using. These bonuses kick in very early, and last all game as long as you’re using a weapon that you’re skilled in. Later on they get a cheeky stun which can be useful against casters. Into midgame their melee weapons penetration vs humanoids increases substantially. If the game goes ultra late, they get some more dexterity and speed bonuses, but these pale in comparison to their early damage and defense bonuses.

This focus on evasion, speed, and penetration leads to a high damage melee fighter who needs to use smart positioning and footwork. Duelists rip through most enemies, but utterly lack the ability to use missiles or spells against heavily armored foes. This is where they need to use their increased attack speed and penetration to compensate. They’re very good at attacking and then backing up before the enemy can retaliate, whittling them down with strikes while avoiding getting hit. However, they lack any movement speed bonuses, which may steer them towards star signs and talents to compensate. Since missiles are off the table, Duelists should be extra mindful of wands and booze so that they have some kind of ranged option. Or they can pick a race such as Hurthlings which start with several levels in thrown rocks to give them a fallback plan.

In short, Duelists are tricky melee combatants, who lack even the basic versatility options available to most classes. They’re not overly complicated to play, but reward good positioning and melee-kiting to take down the strongest foes. If you want to do nothing but melee, Duelists are probably your best choice. Just be mindful that their defenses come from attack speed and DV, not raw HP.

The challenge class of ADOM, Chaos Knights are really REALLY bad. But not because they’re weak! They’re actually amazing melee combatants. They start with probably the best equipment in the game, with better initial armor than Fighters. Their HP is comparable to Barbarians. Combat isn’t the issue. No, the problem with Chaos Knights is that almost everyone hates them, and will refuse to give them quests or sell them items unless they can at least become Neutral. But they start off extremely Chaotic, and gain only 10% of the alignment increase of every other class in the game. If they somehow manage to become Neutral or Lawful, they lose access to all their class powers, and start taking fire damage every few turns. This damage can quickly kill them, although if they get fire resistance or immunity they can negate this damage.

Class skills are narrow but decent. Athletics gives them speed and stat bonuses. Backstabbing is a good source of damage, but they lack Stealth so you’ll only get it when throwing potions of blindness or cursed potions of invisibility to set it up. Dodge is good, but their heavy armor usually favors PV instead of DV. Similarly, Two Weapon Fighting is somewhat at odds with their class skills. But they get Find Weakness allowing them to hit VERY hard, as expected. They don’t start with Healing or Herbalism, and can’t get Herbalism without doing a long grind to boost their alignment. Healing can be gained the back way by killing Jharod, but this comes at a minor stat penalty. On one hand, you can go Candle star sign and just ignore the skill, but given how limited Chaos Knight resources are, you’ll probably want to grab Healing just to help in every little way.

Chaos Knight class features are honestly great, if a bit inconsistent (fitting their theme). Being corrupted heals them. It’s not much, but it helps against dangerous enemies. Their speed starts increasing by a random amount rerolled each turn. On average this is a really strong bonus, but makes careful positioning not as reliable as other classes with a speed bonus. They start getting bonuses to weapons and stats that reroll each turn as well. Again, inconsistent but strong. Eventually they get reduced corruption when heavily corrupted. This allows them to last a while longer when heavily corrupted, but you should still avoid seeking corruptions and let it build up naturally. Especially because most sources of corruption removal are from quests you can’t access.

Without going into too many spoilers, Chaos Knights have to play the game VERY differently from other classes. Normally you’d do certain quests and challenges in order to close the chaos gate. Every single one of those quest givers tell Chaos Knights to shove off. If you manage to grind up to neutrality, they’ll grant you those quests, but at the cost of being essentially classless. If you embrace chaos, you have to kill or relocate some NPCs in order to get past the various barriers in your way. Chaos Knights are massively advantaged in the short term. Fights are quick and brutal in their favor. But they are massively disadvantaged in the long term. Nearly every resource available to other characters is forbidden to them. They’re forced to scavenge whatever they can find, and rely on luck to get what they need. Unsurprisingly, this leads to very chaotic and unpredictable runs. You can’t rely on the guaranteed tools and safety nets available to everyone else.

These classes specialize in not specializing. They tend to have the most flexible game plan, adapting to their situation and leveraging the widest array of skills. If you want to have a lot of tools, without being a squishy caster, these are the classes for you. Despite their somewhat generalist nature, these classes have a lot of variability between them. Some lean more towards one aspect or another, but all rely on a mix of playstyles and general knowledge. They’re generally not as strong as some of the specialized powerhouses like Archers or Wizards, but never as weak as the limited classes like Merchant or Chaos Knight.

The “spellsword” of hybrid classes. Paladins have decent HP, Good Melee, and 2.5x the rate of Spellbook drops of every class except the pure casters, without the penalty to weapon skills. They’re actually not the strongest casters of the hybrid classes, but their increased spellbook drops allow them to have the widest selection of spells. Like all divine casters, their tome drops will skew towards defensive and healing spells. While their HP is middling, they do start with excellent armor and weapons. They also start with Healing for a comfortable earlygame.

They get some of the good physical skills, such as Athletics for speed and stats, Dodge for DV bonus, and Healing for early sustain. But they don’t Find Weakness or Alertness. Concentration boosts their magical abilities and helps with learning spells. They even get Two Weapon combat oddly, which opens that playstyle even if it’s not ideal. They’re pretty open to do what they want early, but encouraged to grab Herbalism for stat boosts later.

Their class features are a mixed bag. They receive a 20% bonus to piety gains through sacrifices. This somewhat helps with being crowned champion, which is usually worthwhile as Paladins get some excellent crowning gifts. Curing disease is helpful very early, but diseases are easily avoided. Paladins are also durable enough to just wait out the disease in town. Turning undead may be useful to prevent getting surrounded, but in general the undead it works on aren’t much of a threat with Paladins starting gear. Eventually they get a powerful DV bonus when fighting enemies of opposing alignment (neutrals get this against both lawful and chaotic enemies). This comes a bit late, but is very strong for a Paladin of non-chaotic alignment. Paladin’s are largely defined by their increased spellbook drop rates, and DV bonus.

In general, Paladins play more like Fighters with less HP and damage. They compensate with versatility and some excellent defensive bonuses. They should have a decent array of utility and bolt spells and can learn some of the stronger spells (including ball spells) at mid levels, especially if they bless their spellbooks. Later on, they get some of the highest DV bonuses of any class. This DV bonus tends to heavily discourage having a chaotic alignment. Though paladins have no advantages to missile weapons, they still have decent accuracy so they can pull those out too. But in general Paladins lean into a mix of melee and spells to carry the day.

Bards lean into the chaotic unpredictability of Chaos Knights, without the combat potential or disadvantages. No bard run is the same, as they receive completely random skills at the start of the game. Their only guaranteed skills are the ones they get from race, and the Music skill. Their starting gear is nothing impressive, and they have HP comparable to an Archer or Druid. Their only consistent advantage at the game start is that they start with a pet animal based on their race. This is useful, but will likely get killed early on. If you can keep it alive, you might have a decently powerful ally, but it will also split experience with you, weakening you as a result.

Bards can tame more animals with Music, but they tend not to scale to the challenges you’ll face outside earlygame. There are a few exceptions, but powerful animals are not available in the earlygame, or to a newer player without access to the Bug Temple. This is a useful skill to avoid killing cats, or enlist an animal with a useful feature like digging to mine for you. But as a core strategy it carries many of the same problems of Necromancy. You shouldn’t neglect it as a way to deal with tricky situations, but always focus on strengthening yourself over a pet.

Class features are interesting, and unpredictable. At level 1 they get a free extra talent. Bards have a hidden feature where weapons and armor are more likely to have attributes off of the base value. This can make found equipment better than baseline, or worse. Sometimes it can be both with an armor having an unusual bonus to PV and a malus to DV, or vice versa. This can encourage you to identify everything so you can find better than average equipment, but makes equip-identify potentially dangerous if you get a penalized cursed item. At low levels, Bards receive additional skill increases to leverage their extra random skills. As they level, they start receiving free levels in random weapons skills, and learn 4 spells at random. At level 25 they 6 random skills are learned or improved (if they already knew them), further widening their skill selection. By this point the game should be over, but if you do reach high levels you get some increased HP and PP regen, and some bonuses to all stats.

Fitting into the unpredictability of Bards, they actually get a really good bonus to learning spells, but can’t guarantee that they’d gain Concentration. If they do get Concentration, they can actually learn some of the most powerful spells at mid to high levels. But even without it they’ll be pretty good casters with whatever tomes they find. But of course their tome drop rates are still baseline.

Bards are weird. They can’t predict anything, and their playstyle is subject to the whims of RNG. They have decent melee, ranged, and casting ability. But all of them could be boosted with lucky skills like Find Weakness or Concentration. Regardless of their versatility, they’re the squishiest of the hybrid classes, suffering defenses comparable to a pure caster. This unfortunately makes them a pretty weak class on average. But if you can play around their weaknesses (and get lucky), they have the potential to have the widest skill set of any class, on top of great spellcasting potential if they find the right tomes.

Ostensibly the masters of unarmed combat, Monks are actually one of the most versatile classes in the game. They can absolutely leverage their unarmed strikes to great effect, but their base unarmed scaling is lower than Beastfighter. As mentioned in the Beastfighter section, this creates some issues for a purely unarmed character when facing undead, and in the mid to lategame. What makes Monks interesting is that it is potentially above average at every fighting style available in the game. One handed and Shield, Two Handed, Dual Wielding, Unarmed, and Missile Weapons, Monk can do it all. It’s also a competent caster, though it likely won’t be able to learn the high powered Ball Spells. The downside of the Monk is that it’s not the most durable class. It has comparable HP to a Paladin, but won’t start with nearly as good of defensive equipment. Monk's starting gear is some of the worst in the game, and they’re discouraged from wearing heavy armor due to their class features.

Monk's skillset is extremely solid for combat, though lacking in utility skills. Monks have Alertness and Dodge for avoiding spells and DV boost. Healing gives them a stronger earlygame and give them more options (such as acquiring Herbalism). Athletics boosts speed and stats. And of course Find Weakness is a powerful damage boost at melee or range with increased crit chance. Monks also gain Concentration to boost their spellcasting abilities a bit, although they’re fairly middle casters. They should be able to learn basic spells without issue, but will struggle to learn the more powerful spells.

Monk’s class features are mostly very solid. They have a hidden bonus to melee critical hit chance which scales with level. This is separate from AND stacks with Find Weakness, making them a critting machine. Their circular kick is worthless, but they rapidly gain the best movement speed bonus of any class. At level 25 they can switch places with hostile enemies further boosting their mobility. Their later powers are neat but largely irrelevant. They also have some hidden powers which are not covered in the manual. At level 13, Monks can kick down walls, although it can take a couple kicks per wall due to randomness. When they use a magical writing set to create scrolls, they do not suffer any mana loss. They also only need half as much food, which doesn’t matter outside of earlygame but is still a nice convenience. One downside is that they cannot “True Berserk” even if they fight naked. They can still go into berserk stance just fine, but there’s no benefit to taking off armor.

Martial arts are one of the most interesting features of any class. They’re a big part of why Monks can use any weapon in the game. Martial arts give a bonus to unarmed attacks, unarmed damage, DV, and Speed. But the interesting part is that you can scale back on some benefits while retaining others. For example, if you equip a weapon but no shield, you retain the leveled DV bonus. This means that a Monk using a two handed weapon or dual-wielding can still have enough DV to compensate for the lack of a shield. Of course you also lose the benefit if wearing armor weighing more than 60s. But you don’t lose the speed bonus under any circumstances, even wearing plate mail.

All of this creates a sort of sliding scale of martials arts, based on what equipment you find and how much you want to embrace it. If you prefer weapons, you can use them without DV penalties. That extreme DV bonus more than compensates for the loss of a shield. If you prefer a shield and full plate, you can still retain your speed bonus at least. You can pick where along the spectrum you feel most comfortable. It’s important to note that if you choose to dual wield, you’ll want to pick up the Two Weapon Fighting skill from Bart before you commit heavily to it. This range of flexibility is great, but in general you’ll probably be best suited using a two hander and light armor. That said, Monks have the highest DV of any dual wielder so if you want to do it, they’re a good fit. Despite lower base unarmed damage than Beasfighter, the increased crit chance actually balances out nicely. Beasfighters consistently hit hard, but Monks will crit way more often. That said, Monks crit more often with ALL fighting styles, not just unarmed. Heavy armors will require you to use a shield if you don’t want to forfeit your DV bonus, but this might be worth it if you find a dragonscale plate and a good shield combo (such as Rolf’s).

Tying it all together, Monks have the highest mobility and speed of any class, great combat skills, and the ability to compensate for the loss of a shield with DV bonuses. They have the most flexibility in terms of gear selection. And unarmed can be a good fallback if you lack a strong weapon, or want to embrace it for roleplay. Just remember that unarmed cannot benefit from bless bonuses against undead or demons, which is extremely troubling against undead that can heal. But Monks are on the squishier side, having lower HP than most, and will likely have low PV due to their armor restrictions. Their flexibility comes at a cost to durability, and they’re only moderately skilled as a caster. It’s enough to grab some utility and bolt spells, but they are unlikely to master high powered ball spells.

Time for another weird class. Mindcrafters somewhat defy categorization. They are hands down the worst spellcasters in the game, and the only class that doesn’t gain any advantage to learning spells by leveling up. Even the most magically inept class might be able to learn the lowly Light spell. But to a Mindcrafter, reading a spell tome might as well be cuddling a live grenade. Books are only useful for bookcasting if you gain a spell via a wand/potion of wonder. Otherwise, do not attempt to read them. So why are they a hybrid class? Well, because of their titular class-exclusive ability: Mindcraft.

Mindcraft is essentially the ADOM equivalent of psionics. Unlike the wide variety of damage types and utility spells, Mindcraft is significantly more focused. It can do psionic damage to creatures that have minds, (not undead, golems, most insects, most oozes, etc.) but this is actually a pretty crappy use of their abilities. Their real power is the way that mindcraft enhances and enables melee and ranged fighting styles. Mindcrafters at level 1 have one of the best abilities in the game: Confusion Blast. This allows them to confuse enemies at range, on demand, which causes them to stagger around and be unable to do anything except maybe accidentally attack you if you’re the lucky space they stumble into.

As they level up they get tons of other useful tricks, such as psionically shielding themselves to increase DV and PV, allowing them to actually tank up in a melee fight. They eventually get telekinetic blasts, which are still super inefficient, but allow them to damage any enemy at range. Greater Telekinetic Blast can be used at a distance without having to line them up in one of the 8 directions, allowing them to snipe dangerous enemies like Liches from the relative safety of 10 squares away using their weak summons as a meat shield. They eventually get the ability to teleport on demand, which is aided by the fact Mindcrafters have perfect teleport control at level 1, and cannot lose it by any means.

So Mindcrafters are weird, how do they play? Well, it’s tricky. They have the HP, melee, and ranged accuracy of a full caster. So they’re extremely frail, and not super accurate. On the other hand, their mindcraft is extremely PP inefficient and does much less damage on average than spells. On the other other hand, their Mindcraft will never run out of castings, ever. And on the other^3 hand, they advance weapon marks at full speed like non-casters. Basically, Mindcrafters use their “spells” to create openings to compensate for their low damage. Yeah they don’t do a lot of damage, but when an enemy is staggering around aimlessly, suddenly they feel like really good archers. If they need to go into melee, they can get around a +6 DV and +3 PV shield on demand at level 9, which scales with level and can eventually reach almost triple that. It may cost a lot of PP, but sniping summoners behind their summons with Greater Telekinetic Blast feels absolutely amazing. Mindcrafters may have the stats and variety of a caster, but they rely heavily on melee and missiles to actually deal damage.

Moving onto the finer details, Mindcrafts have a paltry skill selection. Their only real boons are Concentration and Herbalism. Both of these are excellent skills, but it’s not a lot to work with. You’ll definitely want to pick up Healing with how frail they are. Their class powers are decent, but not amazing. Extra confusion resistance is situationally great. Detecting monsters is unfortunately crap, as it doesn’t work on mindless enemies (Ironically the Eyes of the Mind “spell” they get at level 18 is actually amazing, and superior to the level 12 skill in every way). At higher levels they get bonuses to Willpower and PP, which is a fairly generic power boost.

So Mindcrafters are essentially casters who can’t cast spells, and have to use weapons to actually kill things. They start the game extremely frail, with weak equipment and poor damage, but confusion is such a strong status effect that it can potentially overcome these weaknesses. Despite those limitations, they’re actually an incredibly powerful class if you can learn to use them properly. Yeah they’re still not going to beat an Archer or a Wizard. But they’re a weird mishmash of “magic” and weapons, who can become incredibly strong in midgame or lategame. That said, they’re a very polarizing class. Some rate them badly because of their slow start. Others see them as just shy of the strongest classes in the game. The one thing everyone agrees on is that they’re not a very forgiving class.

Probably the most defensively oriented hybrid, Healers receive excellent bonuses to both HP regeneration, and max HP. They’re probably the strongest caster of the hybrids, but they also get Find Weakness allowing them to melee quite as well. Healers are a straightforward hybrid with no gimmicks. Just a lot of durability. On the downside, they have truly awful starting weapons and armor. Healers have to rely on their durability and regen until they find some decent gear.

In contrast to their weak starting equipment, Healers have excellent starting skills. Healing and Herbalism both start at a high value, which allows them to pick any route. First Aid also starts pretty high, which further boosts their focus on healing up, rather than preventing damage. Concentration makes them an excellent caster. Alertness gives a minor DV bonus, and helps them to dodge spells. There’s not a lot of utility, but it’s an extremely solid foundation.

Healers class skills are similarly focused. They quickly increase their passive HP regen to 300% the base rate of other classes. If they get a companion (which is risky due to how often followers turn on you), they can use First Aid and Healing on them to help keep them alive. Eventually they start gaining castings of healing spells with each level. If the game goes very late, they start gaining bonus HP each level. Even before this, Healers are in the top 5 classes on HP gains, so this pushes them to a frankly insane amount of durability, though it usually comes too late to matter.

There’s not a lot to say. Healers are just a really tanky hybrid. They can wade into melee and do respectable damage. They have excellent spellcasting and can learn basically any spell in the game without issue. Even with bad spellbook luck, they are guaranteed to get healing spells eventually. With Find Weakness, their damage will wind up better than a lot of classes. On the downside, they have terrible starting equipment. Their accuracy at melee or range is pretty low as well. They don’t have any bells or whistles, but the core is very solid.

Scummers require a bit of explanation. All of these classes specialize in a gimmick which allows them to become more powerful through something other than combat. Sometimes this can be grinding, “crafting”, or just doubling back over an area to extract resources each time you pass by. Most of these classes are on the weak end, and have to utilize their gimmick to catch up to other classes. If you like the idea of a slow game where you spend a lot of time building yourself up even more than normal, these might be for you. For most players, they’re probably an acquired taste.

Struggling with offense and defense, Farmers are one of the weakest combat classes in the game. They have low HP, terrible starting gear, and no weapon abilities to speak of. On top of that, they struggle to learn any but the most basic of spells. Their only early advantage is a pet dog that will likely die in the first 5 minutes. Despite these weaknesses, they have a lot of potential to become powerful. You spend a lot of time setting up herb farms, training up skills, and focusing on building yourself up rather than just charging in.

Farmers have a surprisingly wide range of skills available. Herbalism helps them to harvest herbs from their farms. Gardening lets them plant more herbs to grow their farms. Fletchery lets them craft additional ammunition, which they can use better than average thanks to their Archery skill. Food Preservation will increase the drop rate of corpses further boosting their growth potential. Since they don’t have magic, they may actually want to use Cooking to preserve corpses to take to Guth’Alak. Finally, they actually have the Smithing skill, which lets them improve some of their equipment as well. They don’t get the Healing skill, which pushes them towards saving the Carpenter. That said, Farmers want to start slow anyway, so there’s no problem there.

Class features are mostly negligible, but they do get some fun stuff. Most notably, Farmers require 20% less weapon marks to advance Polearms, which is a nice bonus for a nice weapon category. They also start with an extra talent for free. They rapidly gain double carrying capacity, and only need half as much food. Their herb harvesting tends to have better quality yields. In the lategame, they get better chances to increase physical attributes and potentials, which can help them to push their stats higher.

In order to achieve their potential, Farmers will want to farm. Shocking, I know. Because herb bushes follow the rules of Conway’s Game of Life, I’m going to suggest you google how herbs work. Explaining the intricacies of herb growth would take longer than the class description. Generally speaking, you’ll either want to find a level that already has herb bushes, or a level with large rooms but low danger level. If you want to be really safe, you can set up a small farm inside a Terinyo building. Once you pick your location, you’ll need to acquire herb seeds. The quickest way is to use Gardening on existing herb bushes. This will either give you some seeds, or destroy the bush. But if you use it on 2x2 squares of herbs it’s a safe way to gather. You definitely want to hit 80 in Gardening ASAP due to extra rolls. Gather a bunch of seeds, take them to your farm, and use Gardening to plant them in a stable configuration. Wait around until they grow, then harvest. Always leave the herbs with 1 harvest left so the herb group can regrow, and repeat.

Your priorities will be Morgia and Moss of Mareilon to boost your dexterity, willpower, and toughness to 25. After that, you definitely want to harvest a whole bunch of Stomafillia and Spenseweeds to give you access to a ton of healing and food. Spenseweeds aren’t a good emergency heal later on, but when blessed they provide a ton of consistent healing which can last all game. Moving beyond herbs, Fletchery is a rare and powerful skill which can produce massive amounts of ammunition. When using fletchery kits, you should only use blessed logs. You can chop down trees on the overworld, or collect logs from the Animated Forest. Farmers aren’t amazing archers, but they work out somewhat better than average.

Tying it all together, Farmers spend their earlygame cautiously setting up a farm and leveling. Over time they train up their stats and weapons until they can become competent melee fighters. With fletchery sets they can hopefully produce slaying ammunition, or at least some suffixed missiles. By mid to lategame, Farmers will become durable fighters with a (hopefully) good selection of missiles to deal with threats. The increased polearm skills help out a good bit you lean into them. Depending on star signs and playstyle, you have a good chance of reaching grand mastery.

Merchants have the (lack of) combat capabilities of a Wizard, with casting capabilities barely better than a Barbarian. Okay that’s a bit misleading, as Merchants don’t have the caster weapon skill penalties, but they’re still very weak. Their starting gear is bottom of the barrel, unless they start with an offensive wand. Merchants gain power by buying items. This makes their potential highly variable, as shops are mostly random. Generally, Merchants don’t spend a lot of time grinding. Instead, they backtrack to their favorite shop every time they have a lot of gold.

Their skills are fairly mediocre. Herbalism is always good, but won’t do much to help their bad earlygame. They have zero combat skills too. Detect Item Status is very useful in the earlygame, but falls off in utility later once you accumulate scrolls of identify and holy water. Pick Pockets can generate additional items of small weight, but is extremely tedious.

Merchant class powers are interesting. They get an extra talent at level 1 for free. At the start of the game, a random specialization is chosen: wands, scrolls, potions, or rings. You start with a handful of items of your specialization, and automatically identify all items of that specialization for the rest of the game. Additionally, potion specialists gain the Alchemy skill. Due to the lategame power of battle alchemy, potions are easily the best specialization. That said, wands specialists can start with some blasting wands to boost their earlygame. Regardless of specialization, all Merchants can use gold pieces as a missile weapon. This doesn’t do a ton of damage, but it’s a neat trick in the earlygame. Also, it can hit doppelgangers that normally are immune to missile weapons. Merchants also gain doubled carrying capacity fairly early on.

The main strength of the Merchant is how they interact with shops. They receive a scaling discount to shop prices, which eventually reduces price by 60%. This is powerful, but the even stronger feature is that prices of shops never increase. Normally, every time a shop restocks, the prices go up. This eventually makes shops prohibitively expensive. Not for Merchants. Merchants can keep returning to the same shops all game, and never get priced out. There is a guaranteed potion shop every game, which can be great for holy water, stat boosts, and increased HP and PP regen.

Merchants are probably one of the few classes that actually justifies getting the silver tongue and natural trader talents, at least if you want to lean into their strengths (Casters might consider it as well for book shops). It’s tricky deciding when to grab it, as Merchants desperately want some earlygame talents to shore up their weaknesses. On the other hand, the sooner you grab the trader talents, the more chances you get to find shops. Shops are rolled on first entering a level, so you’d want the talents before you start exploring. With all that said, optimal play is still to grab talents like Strong Legs, the PV line, and the speed line. Whether you pursue this strategy or not, Merchants benefit from backtracking to useful shops periodically. Even if no shops generate at all, a guaranteed supply of cheap plentiful potions can do wonders for your stats.

Of the scummers, Weaponsmiths are easily the most capable in combat. Their HP is quite low, and their starting gear is fairly middling. However, they tend to start with great strength and toughness which helps their earlygame quite a bit. Weaponsmiths have excellent melee accuracy, but bad ranged accuracy. They start the game feeling like a nerfed Fighter. Luckily Fighter is still pretty good, so this comes out way better than the rest of the scummers.

Weaponsmith skills are pretty narrow. No Healing or Herbalism encourages a slow start. Athletics gives a nice speed boost and stat gains, which helps them scale up into midgame. Concentration combines with a good base spellcasting ability to make them more of a hybrid character by midgame. Detect Traps is very useful and saves the annoyance of befriending the thieves guild. Find Weakness is a huge boost to crit chance, and boosts their damaging capabilities quite a bit. While their ranged accuracy is quite bad, Find Weakness is enough to justify using missiles. Of course they get Smithing as well.

Their class features are a weird mix of fantastic and terrible. By level 6 they can melt down metal, giving them a massive supply of ingots other classes can only dream of. You can actually trigger spear traps repeatedly to farm spears to melt down. Just make sure you heal after each trigger. They quickly gain a 4x speed increase when smithing. This sounds pointless, but can actually be useful. You might only find forges in corrupting areas. And if you smith outside of Dwarftown, you’ll have to deal with annoying enemies. Smithing faster helps. They get some useful stat increases to strength and toughness. Identifying the material composition of items is kind of pointless. At level 32 they get fire immunity, which is an amazing class feature. Unfortunately, it comes much later than the Tower of Eternal Flames. It’s still great, but would be so much greater if it came sooner.

The Smithing strategy is basically to acquire ingots, and upgrade the crap out of any metal equipment you have. Most classes have to mine for metals, but the Weaponsmith can just break down junk equipment as they go. Finding a reliable forge is critical to this strategy. If you can’t find one, then Dwarftown or the Ice Queen domain have guaranteed forges. You might also be tempted to use the Darkforge for smithing. Do NOT use the Darkforge. The background corruption there is quite high, and isn’t worth the benefit even with the increased Smithing speed.

Weaponsmiths are essentially a hybrid class that happens to have access to a supply of free metal ingots. They melee quite well, and have good casting abilities. They offset their middling HP by forging powerful armor to protect them by midgame. Their skills and features are good enough that they can play a game without resorting to Smithing, but forging powerful equipment can turn them into a melee powerhouse.

Races and Star signs have a decently large impact on playstyle, but not as much as classes. If you’re a newer player, I would advise picking strong and durable options rather than trying to tweak your playstyle. Good races for new players are Dwarf, followed by Drakeling and Ratling. The best star sign is either Candle or Raven, followed by Tree. Candle gives a ton of healing which is great early on before you get your healing up. Raven is better after earlygame or for more experienced players because +10 speed is great, and access to the Rune Covered Trident early is excellent. Tree is a good sign for early durability, but probably not as new player friendly as Candle. Now for options that shift playstyles.

If you want to increase your weapon damage potential, either as a caster who prefers more melee/missile options, or emphasizing combat as a hybrid, then Dark Elf or Orc are excellent. Given Orc’s short lifespan, I would say Dark Elf is the better option outside of certain builds. The reason for this is that Dark Elf gets access to the powerful Find Weakness skill. That said, if your class already has access to this, then Dark Elf provides no real benefit. For example, Necromancers are a pure caster that already has Find Weakness. This means Dark Elf is unnecessary to boost damage if they prefer to lean into weapons.

Adding on to this, the Sword star sign significantly reduces the cost of increasing weapon skills. This won’t massively increase damage potential, but it’s a nice supplement to any class looking to tweak their playstyle a bit. The tactics bonus is small, but of universal benefit as well. Even outside of damage boosting, this combination can help casters to boost DV in coward stance. Increased weapon skill means higher DV on top of the tactics bonus.

If you’re trying to boost your casting potential, Mist Elves are a powerful option as the only race with Concentration. As with other skill based options, this is useless if your class already provides it. Concentration is an extremely powerful boost to spell learning, but is common enough that most classes do not benefit choosing Mist Elf. It’s worth noting that Mist Elves are essentially a challenge race, providing massive penalties to HP and toughness, alongside inability to wear iron. This is a fun option for intermediate to advanced players, but not recommended for newer players.

A much less risky option to boost casting potential is to take the Book star sign. It provides a flat bonus that is equivalent to maxed out Concentration (but stacks with Concentration). The sign doesn’t do much besides that, but bonus skill increases is a nice benefit. If you combine Book and Mist Elf on a class without concentration, you can make a surprisingly competent caster out of almost any class, except for stuff like Barbarian or Mindcrafter.

Holy crap you’re still reading? I’m impressed. Well since you’re here, I’d like to thank the Roguelikes discord server for their help proofreading. Major thanks to Grond for providing tons of information and patience with my questions. If you have anything you’d like to add, feel free to message me and I’ll make some edits as needed.

-Garresh